Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday January 20, 2012 @02:50PM
from the it-worked-on-saved-by-the-bell dept.

New submitter scibri writes "Researchers working on highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza have said they will stop work on the virus for 60 days, to allow them to explain the importance of their work to politicians and the public. Quoting: 'Despite the positive public-health benefits these studies sought to provide, a perceived fear that the ferret-transmissible H5 HA viruses may escape from the laboratories has generated intense public debate in the media on the benefits and potential harm of this type of research. We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.'"
Reader Harperdog sends in a related article arguing that we shouldn't be having a debate about the censorship of research, but rather a debate over whether the research should have been allowed in the first place.

And this is the way the new Dark Ages will begin. Not from where you'd expect, religious fundamentalists who are offended by the challenge reality presents to their mythology. But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.

Yeah, thats exactly right... tinkering with highly dangerous and highly contagious viruses is exactly the same as supressing all of science... Especially since we all know that outbreaks of viruses from such secure research facilities can never happen... Just a random search on ebola offers this.

Lets see.. forest fire vs
50% of 7bil dead and a probable end of our ability to carry out commerce or have a technologically advanced civilzation for a few centuries. hmm... which one sounds like a more serious consequence to you?

I don't care how professional, careful , trustworthy etc your group is sooner or later a mistake will be made or an accident beyond their control. Fire , earthquake, tornado, what do suppose it would take.

One could argue that setting humanity back a few centuries and wiping out half the population would be good for the planet (and perhaps ultimately save the species). It's not an argument I'd be prepared to make, but it's one I'd take seriously, if someone else were to make it.

Are you really implying that the physically fit have lower IQs than the physically weak or vulnerable? If so, I question your own IQ, my good sir.

I don't know what they were trying to imply. However I would agree that anytime you apply strong selective pressure for a specific trait that it is bad for the maintenance of every other trait, because now it's suddenly not as important that those traits be passed on as survival will be dominated by the strongly-selected trait.

For the sake of argument, imagine that there are easily defined "smart" and "fit" dominant genes, and a couple where each spouse possess a single copy of each of the genes. Their ki

Yes, let's kill off the physically weak and vulnerable, and let the physically fit survive. The resulting loss in overall IQ surely won't have detrimental effects on society

If it was a question between being physically fit and being intelligent you might have a point, but that is hugely incorrect. In fact I would say that those who are the most intelligent tend to be very healthy individuals.

Yes, there are many people who are physically fit and stupid, and there are some very out of shape people who are smart, but those are not lifes two options, and very smart people do usually concern themselves about their health.

"I don't care how professional, careful , trustworthy etc your group is sooner or later a mistake will be made or an accident beyond their control."I'm sure your dim witted ancestors said the same thing about the wheel.

And no, the difference between a pigs nose and a mans is not accidental. There are evolutionary pressure for why they are different.If you think that, then you don't understand evolution at all.

Nah, it isn't some mythical "ethicists" that are the problem. Two things are at work here that have shaped this kind of attitude.

First, there is a gradual and seemingly purposeful dumbing down of public education, especially in the "civilized" world. When I was growing up, I had boring math and physics books with theorem proofs and many problems in them. These days my kids have pictures, diagrams, bold colors and boxes with all sorts of historical and "cultural" references, but what was standard hardness in my book is now "optional" or "advanced" and "can be skipped without loss of continuity". The situation is the same in every field that teaches science. Teachers are poor, undereducated and not interested in teaching. Kids are "spared" the "psychological shock" of failure that low grades imply. The situation in higher education somewhat similar, except at the very top, which is accessible to the very few -- who turn out to be the researchers.

Science is hard and getting harder, and to make sense of it, you need to be taught about the basics. There is no time anymore to figure it out for yourself. No education == fertile supply of "luddites". Incidentally, this also means a fertile supply of "consumers".

Second, there is the media world, which has totally gone down the drain in terms of quality. Serious journalism, where reasonably educated people would research a topic and write about it in articles long enough to cover the subject in some depth and breadth has devolved into idiots spewing out 150-200 word articles, or "blog posts" or "twits" of 140 chars or less. They make money by try to make a sensation out of everything. More and more people seriously believe that the Wikipedia article and the top hits on google on any topic give them the full picture. So, you are undereducated and fair and competent coverage, that is filtering out manipulative interests is almost inaccessible to you. How are you not going to become a "luddite" in some fashion or other?

Add to this the growing disconnect between politics, where more and more things is internationally and behind closed doors, and you can understand why people distrust the "official" line more and more, and turn to "the fringe" -- all these movements that we here usually laugh at. Unlike the "official" coverage, the fringe is cozy, warm, easy to understand, and sounds plausible to most in the audience. You can find friends who think like you and join your own misinformation bubble, deepening the problem above and adding psychological support and motivation that further solidifies your "luddite" attitude.

This is your recipe for the dark ages, and, sadly, it starts with your government screwing up the public education and your corporations converting journalism in a platform for sales enhancement.

Education has never been about the dumb kids. That's just where all the effort, money and discussion is focused. The world needs ditch diggers too.

You can't stop the smart kids from learning. No matter how hard the average teacher tries. You have to understand just how dumb the average teacher is. They don't like the smart kids any more now then they did when they where in the grade they are teaching.

The internet has shifted things for the smart self motivated kids. I wish we had it when I was in middl

This is a slightly misguided attitude. You cannot always stop a smart kid, but you can make his/her life a lot harder than necessary. Why?

Also, the more educated your population is, the easier is for the society to advance, especially so in a democracy. If your voters are stupid, don't expect your politicians to be smart, or society to be a good place to raise smart kids.

Here I am just replying to the GP, who, IMHO, is blaming the wrong party. At home I do what I can, but unless there is a large enough group of people who share the general direction my beliefs and can effect political change on a large enough scale, and that means changing attitudes internationally, it is a lost fight. Globalization affects domestic policies too, and the global trend with few exceptions is towards more comfort and less hardship.

quoth one of the fine article: "investigators have proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets"... translation: haemagglutinin are proteins found on the surface of the virus and which help them bind to the attacked cell; they managed to get some viruses to infect a mammal, not H5N1, but _other virus_ that have _one_ of the "attack proteins" in common with the H5N1 virus.

Ludd did not argue against technology, he argued only that increased use of technology should not harm humans. It is industrialists who had no concern for consequence who muddied the waters. This is relevant because in this issue we have a very definite question of whether technology has the potential to harm humans and what the consequences could be.

(As noted elsewhere, I side with the researchers that the potential for harm is negligible in comparison to the potential benefits of understanding why some fl

But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.

Yes, and they explored the ramifications of that and other technology in Caveman Science Fiction [dresdencodak.com]!

comparing creating fire to creating a super flu is retarded. When they screw up and it is released, and they will f*ck up, they are humans, i hope your the first one infected.

This statement is just fucking retarded and ignorant. There has been research going on like this for the better part of a century, including WEAPONIZING even more dangerous bugs than the flu, and none of that has ever been released. Why does everyone think that this one will be any different, the system is proven to work and I'm not the least bit concerned.

The fact that something with a small probability has not happened in the past does not mean that it will not happen in the future. The issue with this research is that the consequences of release are so grave; death of billions of people.

There are safeguards in place to prevent the escape of a deadly virus. There is also an unknown sequence of events that would lead to the release of a virus. The sequence is unknown or there would be a safeguard in place to stop it. Now equate that sequence of events to fli

It is a risk/reward analysis; to me the risk of killing billions of people is much heavier on my scale of importance than any reward from the research.

The risk of research: Billions of people could die if containment fails or if natural strains evolve and spread before an effective vaccine is developed.Reward of research: Eliminate risk of Billions of people dying if natural strains evolve and spread or containment fails.

Risk of NO research: Billions of people could die if natural strains evolve and spread.Reward of NO research: eliminate risk of Billions of people dying from containment failure.

Which is better? There is no action that creates zero risk of Billions of people dying.

including WEAPONIZING even more dangerous bugs than the flu, and none of that has ever been released. Why does everyone think that this one will be any different, the system is proven to work and I'm not the least bit concerned

When they screw up and it is released, and they will f*ck up, they are humans, i hope your the first one infected.

Right. That's why we've had all these epidemics and plagues that came out of USAMRIID and similar institutions. Oh, wait, that's right, you haven't. Because we know how to store and contain weaponized or highly contagious pathogens.

Research with the intentional result of weaponizing the ebola virus shouldn't be done.

They are intentionally taking a virus known to have particularly high kill rates among infected, but poor vectors for infection. And then giving it awesome vectors for infection. They are creating a weaponized super virus.

...have someone studying it now rather than having them start when its already too late. It can take months or years to create a vaccine, then more time to manufacture/distribute it to the public. By this time a large proportion of the world's population could be infected.

Presumably sequencing the RNA (which is pretty quick these days I understand) along with some knowledge of the method by which the virus interfaces with the cells would allow the researchers to compare how similar the natural and lab varieties? I am not a biologist but I would think this kind of thing is pretty routine for things as simple as viruses.

I dont think the argument is over whether it should be studied or not. After a little digging, the argument seems to be over the fact that they are studying it in Biosafety Level 3 facilities, instead of BSL4. As my post below states, BSL3 is for treatable diseases, and BSL4 is for untreatable ones. This one isn't, and should be in BSL4 according to those rules.

The issue with your statement is that there is no "it". Virus mutation can go in many different directions. If the researchers mutate a virus in one direction and come up with a vaccine that is great for that virus. If nature goes in a slightly different direction and mutates the virus in a different way the reasearch done is useless as the vaccine for the research virus will not work on the wild virus. Even if the research virus has a vaccine there is nothing to say that if the research virus ever escapes

Providing the wild variety has the slightest chance of mutating into something like this, I reiterate my point that I would rather have it studied now and not later. That's not to say I don't think caution is necessary.

What difference does it make if the wild variety has no chance to mutate to the human-engineered form? The people are making this extremely dangerous variety who's escape could kill millions of people. And the upside to creating this dangerous virus is what exactly? You don't know, but are already OK with letting the experiment continue?

'But he thinks that the duration of the pause is too short. “The 60 days will likely not be adequate in terms of getting a truly workable international policy and applying that. I just don't think that's realistic,” he says. '

Is it really too short, or are the parties involved not interested enough to put their time into resolving it quickly? Because if they aren't really interested in coming to a resolution, the scientists have just wasted 60 days of their lives for people who don't actually c

And I admit I don't know the difference between level 3 and level 4 facilities

I'm a catastrophic movie lover and I can knowledgeably tell you that level 3 facilities only require you to have a face mask, glasses, gloves and being extra careful with your test tubes, whereas level 4 facilities involve a sci-fi-like separated building with an imposing airlock controlled by an handprint-operated electronic lock making cool noises, inside which scientists work in awesome-looking spacesuits!

"Biosafety level 3This level is applicable to clinical, diagnostic, teaching, research, or production facilities in which work is done with indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.[7] It includes various bacteria, parasites and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans but for which treatments exist, such as"... blah blah blah. Key words, "treatments exist."

We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.

Why does this remind me of all the stories where some contractor walked out of a "secure $organization facility" with highly sensitive data/source code/credit_card numbers etc...?

Should we be surprised when we read a story one day that says that some Chinese researcher walked out the door with a container of some highly contagious strain of Ferret Flu...

Would somebody please think of the poor terrorists? Everybody knows they are not smart enough to do this sort of research on their own. Without real scientists helping them create doomsday weapons like this one, how will they ever take over the world?

What they are working on is a way to create a sustainable world with a far smaller population. You can't just line people up against the wall and shoot them or poison them as the Nazis did but a global epidemic accidentally released from a laboratory will serve just as well and with a far smaller number of people that need to be held accountable.

It seems like both right and left want to stop research in science depending on RELIGIOUS POVs. The evangelicals, want to stop genetic research, deny evolution as well as Global Warming. The left, with their own brand of religion, want to stop nuclear research and now this.

it is hard to believe that America was at one time, the leading nation in science. Since the likes of reagan onwards, we have suffered over and over by both extremist on right and left wings.

I see no reason for an experimental virus to be both highly contagious and deadly at the same time. Couldn't you learn the same thing from two viruses. One that was very contagious but not dangerous and another that was very deadly but not contagious?

Why put the warhead in the missile if you don't intend to kill people? if you want to test the missile, put a dummy warhead in it. If you want to test the warhead, then detonate without the delivery mechanism.

Viral researchers do this sort of thing all the time. They test contagious viruses with harmless strains to watch how they get into the body. Deadly strains are typically injected. They're not airborne.

Maybe I don't understand what they're doing but the whole thing smells like a germ warfare lab if they're combining the two and trying to make them more deadly. That's a weaponization program.

Those researchers found that there is a virus that is hightly contagious and deadly. Also, this virus is likely* to be created at Nature, so it is interesting by itself. The researchers thus want to know how this specific virus behave, not some generic fast spreading or some generic lethal variation of it.

* For suficiently unlikely values of "likely". It is likely enough to make people afraid, but just because the result will be a lethal pandemic. If it was something less damaging,

It seems to me that these researchers need adult supervision. Forgetting about 'terrorism' for the moment, the consequences of a small mistake or small misunderstanding are far too large. They appear to be thinking like little children playing with cap guns than like adults working with technologies that could possibly lead to either another human population bottleneck or, indeed, extinction.

"We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release."

If it wasnt world war iii, numerous private 'defense' companies would be working on atom bomb by then, and be willing to contract with whichever nation was willing to buy from them. of course, atom bomb research ALSO would eventually enable nuclear power...........

this kind of thing goes beyond atomic bomb. to effectively discharge an atomic bomb you need to go through numerous hurdles. to start a plague bomb, all you need is a working sample that is enough to infect 3-4 people in a crowded location.

Doomsday weapon; kill all humans on the planet. Except that's not really what you want, it might get you. What you want is to selectively be able to kill someone. Maybe an individual, maybe a certain ethnicity etc.

So. They've already got the doomsday weapon now, the biological equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. How do you control it? How do you make it only kill Russians, or Iranian

It's still just a variation of the Flu. Some people will be resistant.

If you want a doomsday weapon you have to genetic engineer in some African sleeping sickness surface chemistry genes. That would really fuck over our immune systems.

I bet (hope) the new $150,000 gene sequencer machines are pre-hacked not to sequence those genes, just like printers would'nt copy currency. All they would need is a table of hash's in the machine. Every time the CDC finds a new very dangerous gene they add a hash with th

...it'll be terrorists who use the piblished literature to develop the mutant variations, infect themselves and travel the world to cause a true pandemic!

Oh great... Then we'll have to pick a "volunteer" from amongst our prison population to send back in time to try to establish a link between the outbreak and the Army of the 12 Monkeys only to learn that we've missed the mark...

Government or private makes no difference here. It's bad guys (or just people with lax controls) and good guys. In either case someone will do the research. If the good guys do it (people with good intentions and good controls) then we stand a chance of saving people when the bad guys do it and fuck it up.

Newsflash: SOMEONE is already doing it on a scale so massive that human beings can't even come close to competing with. That someone is called The Universe, or more specifically in this case the Planet Earth.

Flu virii are replicating and recombining on their own. They do it all day every day in billions of organisms around the planet. By doing a tiny tiny tiny version of the same thing in a controlled manner in a lab, we can learn a whole lot about that natural process that will provide wonderful insights to help combat the really bad stuff that the evolution of these virii WILL produce at some point.

In all likelihood all of the combinations that these scientists come up with already exist somewhere.

Given a large enough number of viral mutations and a large enough timeframe, all events with non-zero statistical probability should be considered essentially certain to occur.

Regardless, though, of whether this specific pathogen would arise, we have the question of whether the development of it tells us anything new about how viruses work (specifically the flu virus) and what makes a virus deadly versus not deadly. The evidence so far is that it does tell us something about both. I consider that to be a ve

likewise, radioactive decay is happening everywhere on earth, so who cares if someone has a neutron bomb

pffffffffffft

of course in the vast scope of the universe human endeavour is paltry. but that doesn't mean a couple of smart humans can't get together and make a virus purposefully tailored to infect humans, and do that well, and do that tomorrow, rahter than mother nature arriving at the juncture in 20-2000 years

and some other asshole fucks up and releases it by mistake or some nutcase thinks its a good i

...the really bad stuff that the evolution of these virii WILL produce at some point.

NOT. VIRII.

You sound like an idiot.

Indeed. The closest Latin word to virii would be viri, which is just the plural for vir, "a man". So I guess the GGP might be right -- "the evolution of these virii^Wmen" *has* produced some really bad stuff.

More pedantically though, assuming virii existed as the plural of some Latin word, the rules state that the singular would be virius -- still not virus, and not a word in any language that I'm aware of.

Going the other way from singular to plural and using basic Latin rules, many people might look at virus and assume you just change the -us to -i to make the plural, but that gives us viri again -- meaning "men" as the plural of "a man". Looking deeper, we find that the actual Latin word virus was uncountable [wiktionary.org], so it never even had a plural in Latin -- so applying Latin rules for deriving the plural is just silly.

Applying English rules for plural formation to the *countable* *English* word virus gives us the proper plural form viruses.

True but then, why not experiment with the LEAST harmful virus to learn about "natural process", instead of starting with one already hyper-deadly?

Emergency broadcast from the CDC: "We've had reports that a new mutated strain of the common cold virus has been detected in multiple metropolitan areas and seems to be spreading at exponential rates among the population. Thanks to years of research by our dedicated scientists, we are prepared for this circumstance and have procedures in place. We recommend that everyone wash their hands regularly and cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze. If you suspect that you may have already contracted this d

I see your point, especially related to #7. However, I'd prefer to know that we understand pathogens, antibiotic actions, and immunization before we really, really need that knowledge. Bubonic Plague wiped out about 1/3 of Europe's population because they didn't have antibiotics.

I see your point, especially related to #7. However, I'd prefer to know that we understand pathogens, antibiotic actions, and immunization before we really, really need that knowledge. Bubonic Plague wiped out about 1/3 of Europe's population because they didn't have antibiotics.

It was even worse than that. I read somewhere that many Europeans blamed cats (because they were witches pets) for the Plague and killed them, causing the rodent population to increase! Yikes!

We have finite resources we should start to be wiser about prioritizing things. There are some things that should be done earlier, some things that should be done later, and some things that we should avoid doing.

IMO this research is definitely not one of the "do earlier" items. Tell me what's the potential benefit vs the potential cost?

If one day there exists a way to develop a "Big Red Button" that could kill more than 50% of the humans in the world, saying a country shouldn't make it illegal just because

Breaking evolution for humans... are we supposed to be for Darwin's Evolution or not? If we Evolve, then why are we trying so hard to stop it? Seems short sighted to me.

it doesn't break evolution any more than the first human who wore the skins of another animal to survive a cold winter night broke evolution. Our intelligence, our ability to invent and use technology, is an evolved survival skill -- our best survival skill.

It doesn't matter if we are "for" evolution or not -- evolution is not a religion, "evolving" is not some spiritual end-goal like Enlightenment. Evolution is something that happens, that is happening.

If these guys don't do the research, someone else will. Probably some government, and then they'll spread it once they have a secret cure for themselves.

They'll target a school, a tube station, and a water-treatment plant. Several hundred will die within the first few weeks. Until at last the true goal comes into view . . . after the election, lo and behold, a miracle. Some will believe that it was the work of God himself, but it will be a pharmaceutical company controlled by certain party members that will make them all obscenely rich. But the true genius of the plan will be the fear. A year later, several extremists will be tried, found guilty, and execut

If these guys don't do the research, someone else will. Probably some government, and then they'll spread it once they have a secret cure for themselves.

I'm reading the second article linked, the "should we allow the research" one, and I've only gotten to the second paragraph so far and my bullshit sensors are screaming.

the 1918 influenza virus, which killed somewhere between 50 to 100 million people worldwide, had a mortality rate between 2 to 3 percent.

The world population reached 2 billion some time in the twenties. We'll go with 2 billion. That means if the above numbers are correct, the infection rate for the 1918 flu was somewhere between 83% and 250% of the global population.

yeah , but we don't want security research to create viruses and that might get released into the net just so they can figure out what 'might' happen, that and if every computer on the whole earth crashed , that is nothing compared the the economic, cultural and human destruction that would take place if a strong strain of this bug gets loose.